Author: Parth Dhebar

CNET reports that a settlement for the class-action lawsuit in regards to the antenna performance of Apple’s iPhone 4 has been reached. The class-action complaint brought together 18 separate suits, which were accusing Apple of “misrepresenting and concealing material information in the marketing, advertising, sale, and servicing of its iPhone 4–particularly as it relates to the quality of the mobile phone antenna and reception and related software.”

Ira Rothken, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said that: “We believe that the Apple iPhone 4 settlement is fair, adequate and reasonable. We believe that it allows members of the class to choose, and they can get $15 of cash or a bumper, so we believe that type of choice is proportional to the circumstances.” When the iPhone 4 was released in June 2010, reports started to come out that the handset suffered loss of signal when held in a certain way. Due to this, Apple held a press conference that July to address the issue by offering a free case for iPhone 4 units purchased through September 30, 2010.

“This settlement relates to a small number of customers who indicated that they experienced antenna or reception issues with their iPhone 4 and didn’t want to take advantage of a free case from Apple while it was being offered in 2010,” Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison told me on Saturday.

Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 4S, was tested by Consumer Reports and the device is free of issues.

Lately, Apple has been getting criticized a lot for its factory conditions. Just yesterday it was reported that according to the Fair Labor Association (FLA), Foxconn’s factory conditions are to be “first-class” in comparison to the garment factories the association has typically monitored. Today, Foxconn has announced that it has raised the wages of its workers by 16 to 25 percent.

According to Reuters, the salary of a junior-level worker at its Shenzhen plant in China grew to 1,800 yuan per month. Also, that wage can even go beyond 2,200 yuan if the worker passes a technical examination and is a significant increase from the wage of 900 yuan from three years ago.”We will provide more training opportunities and learning time, and will continuously enhance technology, efficiency and salary, so as to set a good example for the Chinese manufacturing industry,” the company said in a statement.

This announcement from Foxconn comes only days after the Fair Labor Association began investing its facilities as part of a request from Apple. The last time Foxconn increased employee wages was in June 2010. Also, Apple announced last month that it was the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, which was a pretty big deal.

Today, Apple has added a counter to its website, which is a countdown to 25 billion App Store downloads. Also, Apple is offering a $10,000 gift card to the person who downloads the 25 billionth app. The gift card is an App Store gift card which can be used to purchase content via the iTunes Store.

A year ago, the company had a similar countdown to the 10 billion mark. That countdown also included a contest for a $10,000 App Store gift card. Shouldn’t Google be offering the same thing because Android’s “winning”? The 10 billion mark was reached on January 22nd last year, which means that the number of app downloads on the App Store have doubled in little over a year!

Since the time the App Store was introduced, the growth has increased exponentially. In the first year alone, the App Store reached 1.5 billion downloads. By January of 2010, the App Store downloads had passed 3 billion. Also, Apple has paid out more than $4 billion to developers, while Google has still yet to reveal how much they have paid out to its developers. To put that in perspective, over $1 billion was paid to developers by June 2010.

I love using iMessage and one functionality that it lacked was the ability to sync with your Mac, but now Apple has changed that. In addition to today’s OS X Mountain Lion news, Apple has released a public beta version of its new Messages app for OS X for existing users. About time, don’t you think? iMessage was one of the biggest features of iOS 5, and it allows users to chat across multiple devices using the same interface that’s used for SMSes. Something which Android still lacks till this day. The best part? While SMS costs additional money, iMessage does not. It is offered for free!

The new Messages app includes the features of iChat and FaceTime and adds compatibility with the features of iMessage introduced for iOS last year. You can download Apple’s iMessage beta for free via their download page. It should be noted that you need to make sure the latest version of OS X is running on your Mac. The app also supports AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts.

Download Messages Beta and get a taste of what’s coming in OS X Mountain Lion. When you install Messages, it replaces iChat. But iChat services will continue to work. And Messages brings iMessage to the Mac — just like on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 5. Here are the features you can expect with Messages:

Whoa! That was a bit unexpected from Apple. Today, the company has announced that it has released the first developer preview of the company’s next-generation operating system, called OS X Mountain Lion. Surprisingly, OS X Lion was only released less than a year ago. This release will bring over a 100 new features, including many that already exist in iOS. For example, features such as Messages, Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Twitter integration, and AirPlay Mirroring. If we take a look into this further, it really is brilliant on what the company is doing with their ecosystem. They are combining iOS and Mac into one OS. No more fragmented OSes and versions like Windows!

“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world’s most advanced personal computer operating system.”

In addition, OS X Mountain Lion offers deeper integration with iCloud to automatically configure services like Mail, FaceTime, and Find My Mac, while iCloud Documents handles automatic push syncing of documents across devices. Yup, this is also brilliant. Why? Because Apple has essentially made cloud computing popular among average consumers without them actually realizing it. Also, The Vergepoints out that the company has officially dropped “Mac” name from OS X Mountain Lion.

OS X Mountain Lion will be made available to the public in late summer.

Ah, here’s another success story for the tablet nobody wanted. A new analysis reveals that the adoption of the iPad in enterprise is causing decline of corporate printing. Morgan Stanley says that rapid increase of tablets for business use has affected printing by more than it had originally estimated. Wait a minute, I thought the iPad is just a “big iPhone”?

The firm surveyed 700 tablet users in the U.S. about their printing behavior at work. Turns out, 46 percent of respondents said they printed less, with 13 percent indicating that they printed 16 percent less after owning a tablet. In addition, 41 percent said that they thought print reduction is the main benefit of tablets.

It is also suggested by the analysis that Lexmark, Ricoh and Konica Minolta, which all have exposure in corporate laser printing, are the most “structurally challenged” by the drop. Looks like the iPad is disrupting all sorts of markets. In the report, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer was also quoted saying that the iPad has experienced “unprecedented adoption in business”. According to Oppenheimer, nearly all of the top Fortune 500 companies are actively using iPads.

When a company says that they are doing all they can to solve an issue, you better believe it. Lately, Apple’s been getting a lot of flak for factory working conditions even though they are the only one doing something about it in the industry. Just yesterday Tim Cook said that Apple is doing more to improve workers conditions than anyone else. Pretty hard to make that up if you ask me. On top of that, the day before the company issues a press release announcing that the FLA has begun inspecting Foxconn’s facilities at Apple’s request.

Reuters now reports on the association’s initial impressions as it continues to investigate and analyze data on working conditions. According to the FLA, Foxconn’s factory conditions are “first-class” in comparison to the garment factories the association has typically monitored. In addition, it is reported that the association has 30 employees auditing the factories, with Foxconn employees being surveyed for the audit using iPads to record their responses. Three separate Foxconn factories representing 300,000 workers are being audited over the course of three weeks.

So I bet even after all of this, Apple still continues to remain evil in people’s eyes, right?

Just last week we reported that Siri, the voice assistant found in Apple’s iPhone 4S, will get support for the Chinese language next month. In addition, the report also suggested that Apple was planning to introduce support for Japanese and Russian. Today, 9to5Mac reported that watchful iPhone 4S users have noticed that Siri is now claiming to speak Japanese.

This could be evidence that Japanese support is imminent. When asked what languages it can speak, Siri responded, “I speak Japanese, English, German and French. I’m studying some new languages, too.” However, the settings pane does not provide an option for Japanese.

Currently, Siri only supports English (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia), French, and German but in Apple’s Siri FAQ the company promises support for additional languages. The FAQ notes that the company will add support for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish. Support for the Chinese language is given without a doubt due to the strong growth and demand the company is seeing in the country.

iOS’s iBooks comes with a built-in PDF viewer which does the basics, but what if the user wanted to do more than just view a PDF on their iPad? Well, now there’s a fantastic iPad app for that! The entire app is well thought out, feature rich, and offers a clean and easy to use user interface.

Let’s start off by talking about the app as just a standalone PDF reader. Since the app is feature rich, it offers much more functionality than the built-in PDF reader into iBooks. Readdle’s PDF Expert’s navigation options are much better, including a search for text feature. The search option is something iBooks lacks in my opinion. Also, the app supports chapter lists, bookmarks, and a page scroll feature at the bottom which allows you to quickly browse to a specific page, or skip pages.

The best part about this app is all the multiple notation options and the variety with which you can edit the text. You can freehand highlight text, but you also have the option of selecting block of text to highlight them the color of your choice as well. In addition, you can underline the text, strike-through, or even copy selected text.

Now you might be wondering how you can share and manage the PDFs you edit between a PC/Mac and iPad. Luckily, the app offers support for iDisk, Drobox, Google Docs, and many other services. There’s also an option to share via USB & iTunes File Sharing. Readdle also offer its own online storage, and your “free” account is included in the purchase of your app.

In the end I would suggest, if you are looking for a feature rich PDF viewer app for the iPad, then consider purchasing this app. Compared to other PDF readers at the same price, PDF Expert definitely wins hands down. You can download PDF Expert from the App Store for $9.99.

Once again, Apple has alerted people regarding their workers’s conditions. Lately, Apple’s been getting a lot of flak for factory working conditions even though they are the only company trying their best to improve the factory conditions. What the media and people forget to mention is that Foxconn and other manufacturers are not just making products for Apple. Yesterday, the company issued a press release announcing that the FLA had begun inspecting Foxconn’s facilities at Apple’s request.

Today, Tim Cook commented on the situation at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. He said that Apple is doing more than any other company in the industry to improve the working conditions of the factories in the supply chains. Apple’s CEO once again reiterated his point at the conference today.

“The first thing that I would want everyone to know is that Apple takes working conditions very, very seriously. And we have for a very long time. Whether workers are in Europe, or in Asia, or the United States, we care about every worker. I’ve spent a lot of time in factories personally… Many of our top managers and executives visit our factories on a regular basis. And we have hundreds of employees that are based there full time. So we are very closely connected to the production process…

…In terms of problems we are working to fix, you can read the details on our website, but I would tell you that no one in our industry is doing more to improving working conditions than Apple. We are constantly auditing facilities, going deep into the supply chain, looking for problems, finding problems, and fixing problems. And we report everything, because we believe that transparency is so very important in this area.”

I bet even after all of the evidence Apple is giving, they will still continue to be criticized. Why? Because it is the only company that generates attention in the media. Bottom line is that the company is spot on and not lying. They are the only tech company that provides supplier responsibility reports on factory audits, is a member of the Fair Labor Association, and will also be regularly checking in on factories. I’ll be patiently waiting for any other tech company to stand up. Well, that is if they ever will…